Tutorial Video: Reporting a Bug in Ubuntu

Ubuntu 12.04 is going to be an awesome release, but we are asking our community to download the current daily development release, test it out, and file bugs to let us know where the defects are. This will then help our developers to resolve the problems ready for the final release.

Fortunately, filing a bug is dead simple. Below is a quick tutorial video that I put together to explain how:

I would like to encourage you all to test Ubuntu 12.04 (you can run it from a USB stick and boot into if you don’t want to install on your computer), and be sure to file bugs for any problems that you see. Let’s all come together as a community to test, and this is a great thing to do next weekend at the Ubuntu Global Jam!

4 Comments

Excellent stuff Jon! I’ve been using this functionality for the past few releases and it has definitely upped my participation in the community process.

I’ve encountered two issues over the course of using it however.

Issues get punted very quickly and often times due to a not legitimate request during triage. I’m not advocating for bugs that simply say “it doesn’t work” as I know Ubuntu wants to produce good and useful bugs for projects. But if issue descriptions don’t include what resembles a bulleted list, I find they get rejected almost routinely.

This becomes a problem when the issue contains a perfectly useful plain-words description, something you should expect offering such a convenient tool for reporting bugs.

I don’t say this without personally having recommended that people file a bug and after all their effort, having them come back to me saying “it got rejected” or “it just sat there”. It hurts Ubuntu’s image when I come onto the issue and give it a little push.

There is zero incentive for people to report bugs in current releases. None what so ever. Unless the bug reported is a security vulnerability, the odds of the fix being made and back-ported to their distribution in time (or even at all!) are next to none.
This is made worse by the fact that users don’t always upgrade. This means that if there is a streak of particular glitches and modality issues – cough Unity – users are totally out of luck.

There are obviously technical and even functional reasons why you wouldn’t always offer the latest software to all releases. However some packages do deserve to be on a schedule that falls between releases. We can see people doing this every time they install Chrome and every time it updates itself. Certain higher profile programs simply demand it.

Regardless, I will continue reporting bugs and I’m sure Ubuntu can find a solution to these difficult issues. None of this is to say that Ubuntu has set the bar low – far from it. But let’s not stop now! 🙂

Great video on how to file bug reports!
The example you used while filing your bug is funny because it basically says “I’m Ubuntu’s community manager and I don’t approve these recent keyboard binding changes so I changed them back”
These keyboard binding changes have been a big mystery to me these past few days, and the fact that even you changed the keybindings back brings up an event bigger mystery.
No one on the #ubuntu-desktop IRC channel had a clue about what was going on when this happened, everyone that has commented on this issue on the unity-design ML disapproved these changes and now you show the Ubuntu community an example about what can go wrong when wanting to revert to the original keybindings.

I am trying to do this on Ubuntu 12.04, I tried “ubuntu-bug unity” and it just asks if I want to send this to Ubuntu and the command completes successfully but never takes me to a browser so I can enter more details.

What am I doing wrong or did something change? I would like the bug under my account so I can track it.